Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday July 26, 2005 @11:00AM
from the our-starblazers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "CNN is reporting that the Space Shuttle Discovery has lifted off, marking the United States' returned to manned space flight for the first time since the Columbia disaster in February 2003"

I agree that Miles is the very best we've got, but in terms of enthusiasm and sheer geekiness there was no one better than his predecessor, the late great John Holloman. Loved it when John would say "I'm not sure, let me check" and then haul out his 4-inch-thick binder of the Shuttle Operations Manual.
Hey vultures, I've got some MSNBC commentator's bones for you to pick!

That's why I watched it on the Science Channel. No political commentary (not that I even know if the other networks offered any or not). Nothing but coverage from the scientific aspect of it. They had current and former NASA guys offering commentary.

I gotta say that it was the best coverage of a launch I have ever seen, even better than NASA TV's coverage!

I gotta say that it was the best coverage of a launch I have ever seen, even better than NASA TV's coverage!

I was watching HDNet's coverage before heading out to work - I can't wait to get home and watch the actual launch in HD (it's DVR'd). I did take note of the overall tone of the coverage, though, which was great - very little commentary at all, mostly just a run-down of what was happening at any given time. The goal was to inform, not to editorialize, and there was obviously no pressure to "fill in the gaps" left by silence. It really almost gave you a feeling of being there.

Their coverage also began about three hours ahead of time, with at least half a dozen HD cameras (a few of their cameras were in SD, unavoidably). You really got to see everything, including the astronauts driving up to the launch pad, then riding up the elevator, suiting up and buckling in. The shots of the launch pad in HD looked really amazing, and I can just imagine what the launch itself looked like. I wish they'd show all launches like this!

I for one would go out and finally buy an HD TV and subscribe to a channel that consisted solely of Earth views from an HD-capable camera placed in orbit permanently. Or you could just bolt this on to the side of the ISS. How hard could this be? And you could use the footage for MSN Maps (ka-dunk!)

I have a small pile of "Earth View" tapes from early shuttle missions that NASA used to sell for cheap. Good viewing, slap in a tape and put your favorite space music on the CD player. Not very HD but an excellen

The goal was to inform, not to editorialize, and there was obviously no pressure to "fill in the gaps" left by silence. It really almost gave you a feeling of being there.

You just hit the nail on the head as to what ails American TV broadcast of live events, most commentators don't know when to STFU. You'd never know a picture's worth a thousand words with all the inane drivel being spewed. Sportscasts are the worst in this regard. What I wouldn't give for the ability to filter out the commentators but keep the event/crowd sounds. Sigh...

If you have a surround sound rig, you can probably just mute the center channel, and boost the surround channels. That should raise the crowb noise enough to almost drown out the commentary.

Even if you only have a two speaker (simple stereo) setup, you can connect the +left and +right wires to the two terminals of one speaker to get the L-R signal, which should be the surround sound, crowd noise. If you connect the +left and +right wires to one terminal of the speaker, and then ground the remaining termi

The launch was tense. I watched it on CNN live and you just sat there watching it lift off waiting for something horrible to happen.

Nothing did. I'm one of the people who think that the flight missions are pointless when all we do is go to the space station and have no real objectives (I'm more for the rovers) but watching the successful liftoff was breathtaking.

I'm one of the people who think that the flight missions are pointless when all we do is go to the space station and have no real objectives (I'm more for the rovers) but watching the successful liftoff was breathtaking.

I know it's an area that people have differing opinions, but it seems that there are two very valid goals for the space program, no?

learning more about physics on an astronomical scale (eg. how galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets form... learn more about the birth of the universe

One of the crew members of Discovery is
Soichi Noguchi [allheadlinenews.com]. He is part of the recently created Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
According to "JAXA eyes moon shuttle by 2025 [japantimes.co.jp]", JAXA plans to create a manned shuttle for trips to the moon.

Perhaps, Tokyo should consider using Japan's arsensal high-performance computers [slashdot.org] to advance the state of the art in fighter aircraft and space vehicles. Designing these devices requires intensive numerical simulations which are ideally suited to such high-performance computers, which have been relegated to more mundane tasks like terrestrial simulations (e.g. weather simulation). Building the precursor to a starship seems to be a tad more interesting than terrestrial simulations.

Perhaps, Tokyo should consider using Japan's arsensal high-performance computers to advance the state of the art in fighter aircraft and space vehicles. Designing these devices requires intensive numerical simulations which are ideally suited to such high-performance computers, which have been relegated to more mundane tasks like terrestrial simulations (e.g. weather simulation).

I always hear people saying stuff like, "more powerful computers will allow us to build better aircraft and conquer cancer!!!!!"

the german commentator i was listening to was having a great time detailing every single computer-state change down to the launch and even until SSRB detach.. so kraftwerk, it had me reaching for my vocoder...

great that discovery is off. gonna hold my breath until the chutes' deployed and the handbrakes on, however..

There are always vultures there. I went on a tour of the facilities a while back and there were vultures all over the place especially flying around the VAB. I asked some employees there about this and they say the vultures get great thermals there because of the huge building.

Fuel SENSOR, not valve. One of 4 redundant units, which only come into play when a few systems above them, which are duplicated for redundancy, fail. For this particular system to botch, the three other sensors would also have had to fail.

After draining the tank, NASA could not reproduce the failure. Wiring was tested/replaced/etc, no failures.

The decision was to test multiple times before the launch, including one last test at 9 minutes before. The only conditions that would allow launch to continue, the sensor works, or fails in the exact same mannor as before. Any other behavior patterns would have halted the launch. Had it failed the same way, the behavior would have been predictable, and the systems setup to ignore the faulty sensor and rely on three other duplicates.

One of the two conditions was met, it worked flawlessly on all tests up to and including the one at 9 mins before launch. Once in space, the booster tank is already jettisoned, sensor included, so if it wants to fail during reentry, more power to it.

I was just in Orlando this past week, 45 minutes away from Cape Canaveral. I flew home last night, so if it had launched just a day or two earlier I would've been able to see it live...darn. Either way, I'm glad that this launch went smoothly, any more problems would be very very bad for NASA at this point.

I saw the live feed from NASA.. I must say congrats.. but I'll give the conspiracy theorists something to ponder.. from the t-minus 30 minutes that I caught it, there was no switch to internal cameras to show the crew on-board.. this was not the case on the feed from the scrapped launch weeks ago. plenty of live shots on the crew that time. hmmmmm.. perhaps this mission is humanless??? hmmmmmmmmm???

Sad to say, but the examples you cited weren't lives lost in the pursuit of knowledge.

They were lives lost to managerial short-sightedness and corner-cutting.

It's one thing to take a calculated risk when you understand the odds. To take your fate in your own hands. It's totally different to put your fate in the hands of others, who then don't treat the situation with the diligence it deserves.

To go to other places, we have to learn a lot about long duration space flight. You want to jump right to the end result without doing the hard work first. It's not going to happen. We do the work, we get the "cool stuff" you want. Not all of exploration is glamorous. A lot of it is just hard work.

I'm 29 and this is still cool as hell. I'd love to be up there. You, apparently, have lost that sense of amazement. I'd hate to be like that in another four years.

I'm excited because my 10 y.o. son is excited. Try living your life a little through your child's eyes. You'll probably lose some of your cynicism and enjoy things like you did as a child again. It's great.

First, suprised it took this long to get a/. thread up about it because...

Second, couldn't find a damn feed of the liftoff. Nasa's page had both Real and WMP feeds but Real needed update after update and WMP just fizzled. CNN had the same clip it had since this morning. Yahoo was alright but very choppy. Was hoping a friendly/. poster would have a comment to a good feed but.....

I heard there was a practically a media city down there but I barely saw it. sigh.

I saw it on CNN I think. A bunch of people here at work watched it from t-1:30 until the commercial break. Which the commercial was the Windows self help guy, with his CDs to help you learn how to use Windows. At which point everyone walked away and went back to work. The obital saparation from the fual tank was spectacular though. Never had shots like that before, so it was a very nice first.

Sure:
The speed at which God would be moving that would result in 13.8 billion years passing in 6 days is 0.99999999999999999999999929053887c.
All things considered, 0.9999999999999999999999993 is good enough for sig. figs.
I used the Lorentz transformation and solved for v/c.
I needed to know the ratio of the two time periods. 13.8 billion *365/6 gives you the ratio of days. I'm ignoring leap years, but it's insignificant.
Now, that's a large number, and you take the reciprocal, square it, and then subtract it from one. The square root of that should give you v/c.

Darned Dallas newspaper printed the 10:39 time as though it were local, so I missed it. The Mission Status Center is the next best thing. Interesting tidbit: "Mission specialist No. 3 Andy Thomas... spent four months living aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1998." So he's got experience patching up balky tin cans in space...

I have a friend who alerts me in IRC when it's time to watch, so the Dallas paper didn't mess me up. Unfortunately, neither the Yahoo servers nor the Akamai servers (both of which were NASATV's "partners") gave me anything to watch. Closest I got was a frozen "live" image of the shuttle with gantry still attached, then the screen going grey and the audio coming on and telling me they were 500 miles out. And that was in realplayer, which I was desperate enough to dl because Yahoo's link just gave me blank pa

I got to watch the liftoff while at work, at a place where many of the parts of the shuttle were built. It was pretty cool watching it next to guys who had helped build it! All their explanations definitely made the launch even more exciting. God speed to the crew and lets hope they have a successful mission and a safe return!

I wonder if the amount of $$ being spent on running the current space shuttle program is worth it.. or if that money would be better spent in not going to space for the next 5 to 10 years and developing something to replace the current shuttle program.

Even after all the precautions, there were still NASA employees crying foul at today's launch date - which raises the question, "What will it take to convince all NASA employees so the general public can be then convinced to fully back this program?"

or if that money would be better spent in not going to space for the next 5 to 10 years

That was the original rationale for the space shuttle program. There was a 7 year flight hiatus. What good did it do? We really need a more incremental program. This is something we should learn from the Russians. The new NASA administrator is behind the idea. I think you will see a new Crew Exploration Vehicle launched by a shuttle-derived booster, sooner rather than later.

I don't want all NASA employees convinced to fully back the shuttle program. The shuttle program is not the end-all of spacecraft. It's debatable how useful a step in space exploration it even was. It's an amazing feat of engineering, no doubt, but NASA does a lot of other stuff, stuff that gets underfunded in order to keep the shuttle going.

I'm not sure what your take is on it. Your second paragraph seems to contradict what you said in the first? Do you think NASA should fire anyone that won't toe the line in regards to the management's talking points? That doesn't sound to productive for an agency with a scientific mission.

What was interesting to me was that during the liftoff, the announcer said something to the effect of (paraphrasing) "We have launch of discovery, starting a new era of american space flight taking us to the moon, mars, and beyond!"

I found that interesting because this shuttle launch, while nice, is not any sort of real step forwards to any of those goals. It's not a big step in terms of technology or procedures. It's another replay of something that was pretty much figured out 25 years ago. It's maybe a small step in public perception of the space program, but that's it. It's a new "era" in space flight only because we're so eager to shut everything down when things go wrong.

I dunno, I'm just rambling now. I get this way when I see so much potential get drowned out in PR and politics, and the space shuttle continues to be an example of this.

Scene: me and 50 coworkers at a NASA subcontractor watching the webcast a la MSN Video on an XP box.

20 seconds before launch, the feed goes blank. Way to piss off a bunch of rocket scientists, Microsoft. Way to go. We ended up watching the rest on NASATV on a puny TV, which was ahead of the webcast by a minute. In other words, by the time the webcast went blank, back on the regular TV, we had already missed ignition and lift off.

Several elements will be carried in Discovery's payload bay for delivery to the Station. These include the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello, containing racks of supplies, food and water, and the Human Research Facility-2 rack. Also, the External Stowage Platform and a replacement Control Moment Gyroscope will be carried in Discovery's payload bay.

During Mission STS-114, mission specialists will perform spacewalks to install the External Stowage Platform and the Control Moment Gyroscope onto the Station. They will unberth the logistics module and attach it to the Station to transfer several tons of supplies and equipment, including food and water, for use by the Expedition 11 crew.

As much as I wish they were putting money into something other than the ISS, it's fantastic to see that the shuttle is fully operational again.

T+plus 33 minutes. A few seconds after solid rocket booster separation, a large chunk of something broke free from the external fuel tank. The onboard video camera mounted on the tank showed the object flying away from the vehicle without striking Discovery.

Did anyone else notice that a large piece of.. something.. fell off just after the SRB's separated? It looked black in the tank camera view, and flashed very clearly in the view for short time on the left side (seen from the camera) of the shuttle. I doubt it was an SRB because they had already fallen further away a few seconds earlier.

I bet we will be hearing a lot about that in the next few days as people start looking more closely at the camera recordings!

T+plus 33 minutes. A few seconds after solid rocket booster separation, a large chunk of something broke free from the external fuel tank. The onboard video camera mounted on the tank showed the object flying away from the vehicle without striking Discovery.

Want to bet that chunk of film is going to be looked at rather closely?

I can still vividly recall the Challenger disaster vividly. I was in highschool in NH. Not the one Christa McAuliffe was from, but then NH is a small state so everybody was psyched. A friend told me he heard about the explosion on the radio. We listened for a little while before going to the cafeteria for lunch. One of the women serving lunch asked if I was ok (I guess I looked really pale) and I told her what had happened. She chuckled & said I must be joking. I snapped back at her, and I still remember it clearly: "Do you have a radio in here? Then turn it on!", then left. When I came back for more food a little while later they did have a radio on and she was incredibly apologetic. That's one of those days I'll probably remember for the rest of my life.

So I pull out of my driveway into the street, then the guys on the radio say "We're switching over to the shuttle coverage, it lifts off in one minute". I turned right around, went back inside the house, turned on the radio, then turned on the TV, all the while annoyed that I didn't realize it was a morning launch. By the time the TV warmed up, it was T+7 seconds. So I watched the ascent on TV (crystal clear digital television, by the way) while listening to the radio. Once it was part way up I switched

Sky News (UK) have clearly shown an object falling onto the tail of the shuttle as it left the launch pad. The tail knocks the object with enough force to push the object upwards. Question is, is it the same type of object that was shown falling away at booster seperation?Hopefully no damage to the shuttle tail.

MSNBC just showed the video a few times.. it fell off from the side/bottom of the big orange tank and it went out/down and away from the shuttle. so from the video, it seems it didnt hit the shuttle or anything

Spaceflight now [spaceflightnow.com] has an image [spaceflightnow.com] from the external tank video that shows a piece of debris falling off from the external tank, just after the solid boosters separated. It doesn't seem to fall in the shuttles direction.

...is, right now, playing live downlink audio while the video is showing replays of all the engineering camera footage.

All the engineering camera footage. While I've been watching they've gone from cameras 150 to 171, one after the other; all the grainy, low-quality video recorded by every single diagnostic camera all over the launch site.

SpaceflightNow reporting [spaceflightnow.com] - An image from the external tank video shows the chunk of debris breaking away from the tank just after the solid boosters separated. See the image here [spaceflightnow.com]

Right now (T+ 6:03:00) on NASA TV mission control is saying to the crew that they've detected two unknown objects falling off at the time of SRB separation, one on video and one on radar, and that they will be going over those soon.

They have told the crew that there is no schedule change for the mission, and that they just wanted to inform the crew, there are no real problems detected as of now.

That's completely normal. Over the next couple days (until thursday) they'll be evening everything out. If you kept watching they were talking about how they were about to fire the orbital manuvering engines to start the evening out process...